Saturday, December 24, 2011

I don't want to leave anybody out in the holiday season. This oughta do it.

The KlezMormons perform "Oy Chanukah" at Muse Music in Provo, Utah on December 15, 2009. For more information about The KlezMormons, search for "The KlezMormons" on Facebook or on Twitter at twitter.com/klezmormons.

Ya in that Christmas funk, bunkie? This'll snap ya out of it! I don't think this is a Christmas song but I don't think it's inappropriate either. If I should find myself wandering lost and alone in the spiritual desert and stumbled into a church, I'd wanta stumble into theirs!

Let's try to remember on these most Commercial of Holy Dollar Days that the Jewish carpenter whose birth we commemorate had a message of peace and brotherhood that got him killed for pissing off and scaring the establishment of His day, and Who did not espouse the hate spewed in His name that is so accepted by some as "Christianity" today.

A traditional recording of "Go tell it on the Mountain" by Peter Tosh/ The Wailers/ Bob Marley & The Wailers or whomsoever it may be. Tosh singing lead.

On the twelfth day of ChristmasRepublicans told meGovernment takeover of health care's comingYour guns Obama's swipingWMD Saddam's a-keepingMedicare they're enhancingWall Street's not bilkingGovernment Reagan was trimmingHalf the people no taxes payingTax cuts more revenues bringWe don't tortureThank the one percentGay marriage is like box turtle love andObama's born in another country.

They're crackin' me up too! Fun to watch. Robert Reich says it's a bad thing. Good piece, though. I'll disagree with him later.

The underlying conflict lies deep into the nature and structure of the Republican Party. And its roots are very old.

As Michael Lind has noted, today’s Tea Party is less an ideological movement than the latest incarnation of an angry white minority – predominantly Southern, and mainly rural – that has repeatedly attacked American democracy in order to get its way....

America has had a long history of white Southern radicals who will stop at nothing to get their way – seceding from the Union in 1861, refusing to obey Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s, shutting the government in 1995, and risking the full faith and credit of the United States in 2010.

Newt Gingrich’s recent assertion that public officials aren’t bound to follow the decisions of federal courts derives from the same tradition.

This stop-at-nothing radicalism is dangerous for the GOP because most Americans recoil from it. Gingrich himself became an object of ridicule in the late 1990s, and many Republicans today worry that if he heads the ticket the Party will suffer large losses.

It’s also dangerous for America. We need two political parties solidly grounded in the realities of governing. Our democracy can’t work any other way.

Here's where I disagree with him: We don't have two parties solidly grounded in the realities of governing. We have one that can barely find its ass with both hands and one that's grinding itself to powder in front of our eyes. A lovely process to watch, I might add.

There's a reason to have two motorcycles too. When one of them is so badly broken it won't run, you ride the other one exclusively until the broken one gets fixed. Difference is, with political parties we have to wait until election day to get parts.

Let's hope we get the right ones. We can ride just the Democrats for a time while the Repugs are getting rebuilt and still get where we want to go until the Dems break down too. Then we're screwed.

Maybe what we need is some Repugs who will listen to reason. Until the day that pipe dream comes true, maybe we need a solidly Democrat Congress for a coupla years. As badly as the Teabaggers have fucked things up, how much worse could they do? Don't answer that...

The U.S. Secret Service said Wednesday it was following up after a California man used Facebook to make a profane threat against President Barack Obama.

"Assassinate the f------ n----- and his monkey children," Jules Manson, 48, a onetime candidate for the Carson, California, City Council, wrote on Facebook Sunday, according to CNN affiliate KTLA....

"I was not in the right state of mind," when he made the posting, Manson told the station. "I was very angry when I made those statements." Asked what he has learned, he said, "to think before you talk. ... Never make statements unless you're in the right state of mind."

This clown lives in a trailer. Musta been the meth fumes off the stove put him in "not the right state of mind".

Also, Carson ain't too far from Compton and maybe claiming he ain't a racist won't be enough to prevent a few drive-bys. Try esplainin' yourself to those guys while they're installing your new air-conditioning one bullet hole (or thirty) at a time. Heh.

Me'n Fixer have called for the demise of many, many neocons, war criminals, one particular POTUS, various and sundry miscreants, etc., many, many times. We're good Americans who believe in rule of law and always, always qualified it by insisting it only be after due process, as in "we'll give him a fair trial and then hang him and then we'll do lunch". Anything else is stupid and just asking for a knock on the door.

[...] None of that matters for just this instance. In one moment, that man actually looked into the corrupt, vile, evil eyes of presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and said, "You're a fucking asshole."

And for that brief moment, Tom Sorensen is America's greatest hero.

Thank you, Mr. Sorenson. For just that one brief moment, you spoke for an awful lot of us who wish they had the chance to say that. To more assholes than just Neutie.

Click to embiggen.

Poor health isn’t slowing down Dick Cheney during the holiday season. The bullish ex-vice president, who suffered five heart attacks, attended a party to welcome Northrop Grumman CEO Wes Bush to DC at former George W. Bush adviser Bobbie Kilberg’s home in McLean, Va., where sources say he seemed “enfeebled.” Cheney sat while others stood at the party, also attended by Virginia Sen. Mark Warner. We’re told he was seen using an oxygen mask to aid his breathing. But Kilberg denied Cheney wore a mask. A Cheney rep added, “Not true. He’s doing fine. He’s celebrating Christmas in Jackson Hole with his family.”

My Christmas wish is that he sheds his mortal coil in the slowest, most painful way possible.

Fortunately this is a testable premise. I propose that for a two year period, poor people who are not white should be put in charge of major corporations as well as most major governments.

If they fuck shit up even worse than the current nitwits, then we, the Left, promise to never ever complain again.

...

I'm down wid it. They certainly couldn't do any worse. Poor folks don't go spending money like drunk squids in Olongapo and generally have more common sense than most of the rich folks I know (it's just that rich folks have the money and juice to fix the fuckups caused by their lack of common sense). I think we'd do pretty well.

But you can't hide. Not only are the GOP congress weasels feeling the heat in Washington, it's waiting for them when they get home:

Everyone knows House Republicans endured tremendous punishment all day Wednesday, making it clear to most observers that in the standoff over renewing this year’s payroll tax cut, they’ll have to blink.

But an even more important story, which escaped notice inside the Beltway, is that the lashings followed GOP members of Congress back to their states and districts.

Here’s a roundup.

...

Like I said the other day. they've gotten too obvious in their obstruction. Even the most ignorant among us (those who the GOP counts on for votes) are getting it.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

As Rep. Stenny Hoyer (D-MD) attempted to call for a vote to extend a payroll tax cut to middle class and working Americans, his Republican colleagues adjourned the House and walked out of the chamber. And if that weren’t odd enough, it got even stranger: As Hoyer railed against them for failing to help working Americans, footage from C-SPAN went silent, then cut away.

Moments later, C-SPAN took to the Internet to explain that it wasn’t their doing, but someone working for House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

If it's Wednesday it must be Morford on the passing of some notables and what happens next.

We cry out, mostly seriously and only semi drunkenly, "Who is the next Steve Jobs? Where will we find another of the notorious intellectual fire of Chris Hitchens? What of someone precious and rare like the humble revolutionary Vaclav Havel?" On it goes.

Hitchens, for one, was a wicked and sly hybrid, one part cruel contrarian jackass, one part brilliant social commentator, one part chain-smoking bourgeois atheist, one part insufferable Iraq war-supporting hawk, all parts rare in literary kind and intellectual breed.

Add to this the fact that the GOP as a whole and the Tea Party in particular have seen to it that science, intellectualism, books, sex, spirituality, independent thought, higher education and decent taste in footwear are all considered elitist boogymen to be eradicated from the dumbed down American mind like fleas from a mangy dog. Not exactly fertile ground for radicals and revolutionaries to take root.

It actually is. Just in the wrong direction. More like potatoes or turnips than brilliant flowers springing into the sunshine.

David Dayen does a lovely job of dissecting this wretchedly dishonest exercise in Galtian self-pity by Jamie Dimon and his fellow one-percenter elites, but I can’t help taking a swing at that fastball they parked right over the plate.

So anyway, how many of these self-alleged “job creators” are totally self-made superior beings? Hmmm, not many:

The 2011 White House Christmas card features a content looking First Pup Bo Obama sitting by a roaring fireplace, flanked by Christmas presents and festive Christmasy ribbons and pine wreaths and bulbs. If you listen hard, you can almost hear sleigh bells....

The day the Supreme Court gathered behind closed doors to consider the politically divisive question of whether it would hear a challenge to President Obama’s healthcare law, two of its justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, were feted at a dinner sponsored by the law firm that will argue the case before the high court.

Apparently not the "radical judicial activists" Neutie would have arrested. He would reserve that for judges who interpret the Constitution in favor of the people.

Last ¶ after a little history of the Federalist Society:

Unfortunately, Bork's views are not unique. They are the views held by the Federalist Society-funding billionaire oligarchs, like the Koch brothers, who would mask their authoritarian corporate capitalism under an Orwellian concept of "liberty" as the two-tiered system of "justice" entailing elite impunity is assured by a "bought-and-paid-for" judiciary.

Madison - State Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman in two cases cast the deciding vote in favor of parties represented by a law firm that gave him tens of thousands of dollars of free legal services, a review of state records shows.

One of those was a high-stakes case this June that allowed Gov. Scott Walker to implement a law that all but eliminates collective bargaining for most public workers. Gableman was in the 4-3 majority that allowed Walker to prevail. Michael Best & Friedrich - the firm that defended Gableman for free in an ethics case - worked for the state and Walker's administration in the collective bargaining case.
...

After a much-longer-than-anticipated caucus meeting Monday night, House Republican leaders announced a plan to vote Tuesday to nix a broadly bipartisan Senate stopgap bill to extend the current payroll tax cut for two months. But they won’t be doing this with a standard up or down vote....

What, they think people will forget all their bullshit by next November? After 3 years of their obstructionist, protect the rich at all costs policies, people already take it as a given that the GOP is the Party of the Wealthy. Since Obama was elected, they've given up caring whether they are obvious or not and I'm hoping even the most dense of us are finally getting it.

In your stocking. The Republicans give a big "fuck you" to working people at Christmas:

The Senate’s two-month payroll tax extension is dead on arrival in the House. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, made that perfectly clear Sunday morning as he said that Congress will have to negotiate a deal closer to the House-passed one-year extension before members leave for the holidays.

“Well, it’s pretty clear that I and our members oppose the Senate bill – it’s only for two months,” Boehner said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “If you talk to employers, they talk about the uncertainty. How can you do tax policy for two months?”

"It's a great embarrassment to the conservatives," Frank pointed out. "They want to tell people who they can have sex with. Come on, all this is big government! Who can I have sex with? Who can I marry? What can I read? What can I smoke? You guys, on the whole -- not all of you -- but the conservatives are the ones who intrude on personal liberty there."

...

Remember, the conservatives only believe in small government when it comes to regulating shit they support.

The insane midget in North Korea has died. Good. Unfortunately, it won't do much for the poor people of North Korea who still have to live in Earth's Asshole:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has died of a heart attack at the age of 69, state media has announced.

Millions of North Koreans had been "engulfed in indescribable sadness", the KCNA news agency said. People were seen weeping in the capital Pyongyang.

His son Kim Jong-un was described by KCNA as the "great successor" who North Koreans should unite behind.

...

We'll see soon enough whether the military will want to continue with a figurehead in charge or if they want to come out of the shadows. The "Great Successor" will live only so long as the generals allow it.

Gordon

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"... That's US here at the Brain! Sittin' all alone out in the cold, thanklessly freezin' our beboops off, lookin' for a chance to lob a few at the enemy and praying for a secondary explosion, wonderin' if it's all worth it or if it will make any difference in the scheme of things ..." - Gordon